Amy Klobuchar, you’re still not a thing

I’ve written twice about Amy Klobuchar’s “optimistic” (translation: grossly and deliberately misleading) approach to the media’s coverage of her, and I could have written more, but when someone keeps doing the same clearly bullshit thing, finding an angle that isn’t “yup, she’s doing bullshit again” is hard and often pointless.

So when Amy did it again by touting a misleading statistic — “(she ranks FIRST for effectiveness among Democratic Senators)” — I left it alone because she was polling around the level of plankton. Why bother writing some long and obvious thing? The longer you look at what she was saying, the more you see that it’s trivial.

1. That effectiveness ranking isn’t a big deal because senators who are up for re-election do more than other senators because they have to be seen being useful. Amy was up for re-election.
2. The bills she sponsored garnered a whopping one Senate vote opposed. They passed by voice vote in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, which should tell you how controversial they were. Mitch McConnell won’t even allow hearings on gun control, a concept that is popular everywhere but in the Senate. For him to allow a Democratic senator to get votes on four bills tells you how unthreatened he feels by them and by her.

And when Amy touted a Republican columnist’s support — while ignoring the part where that columnist said something negative about her— I left it alone because, again, she’s such a large pile of nothing and her gross mischaracterization is so typical that dedicating time to how nothing she is … feels a little sad.

That columnist, by the way? The way to run for president while polling at or below the margin of error is to see that columnist writing about you and tout her approval as something that (largely liberal) primary voters should care about. (If that columnist’s goal is to prop up those marginal candidates in the hope that they weaken the field, someone ought to tell her how well that worked for the Republican Party when marginal candidates Carter and Clinton … won. This is why I’m not worried about field size, and it’s why you shouldn’t be either. The important thing isn’t how many people are polling lower than 5 percent but whether we’re in a recession. If we are, the nominee will win unless that nominee runs an even dumber campaign than Hillary ran. If we aren’t, we’ll get four more years of Trump.)

In any event, Amy is back one more time with one more large pile of nothing. This pile follows opportunistically on the heels of Cory Booker saying his campaign would be dead if he couldn’t raise $1.7 million in nine days,

following which he said he’d had his best online fundraising day ever, which sounds impressive until you realize he got only marginally more than $250,000:

Now here’s Amy:

The fundraising goal is a modest play: At $30,000 in one day, she’s trying to raise about $1 million in a month, which is slightly more than she raised per month in itemized donations last quarter.

But her fundraising goal isn’t the subject of today’s “oh, why?”. This is:

“The New York Times called her ‘the most important figure on the stage’”

Given Amy’s history of taking a columnist’s opinion and changing it into something unrecognizable, I got curious, so I looked up the quoted language. It’s from columnist Frank Bruni, whom you needn’t have heard of. He’s bad, but that isn’t nearly disqualifying in the pundit class, given that the chief difference between a political pundit and an astrologer is that astrologers operate in strip malls rather than on cable entertainment channels.

Bruni writes the following, in a column that’s largely about Elizabeth Warren (“Elizabeth Warren’s Formidable Stride/She comes out of the latest Democratic debate stronger than ever.”):

“Perhaps the most important figure on the stage was Amy Klobuchar.”

So already, we have a piece that is A) not hard New York Times news or the Times’ editorial board but a columnist and B) not factually asserting that Klobuchar was most important, only opining that she might have been.

And why might she have been? Because she:

“aggressively played the necessary role of suggesting that the most progressive proposals — Medicare for All, backed by both Warren and Bernie Sanders — existed in the realm not of the doable but of the dream-able[.]”

So Amy said “No, we can’t.”

Sounds like something Jennifer Rubin would write.

But Bruni (which is an anagram for Rubin, and why am I the first person to make that incredibly important point?) continues, and if only he hadn’t, maybe this wouldn’t be more of the same for Amy Klobuchar:

“Don’t expect her to get any traction, though.”

So, far from Amy’s debate performance being a sign of things to come — which would match the language in her email about how her campaign is “surging” — her showing is, in Frank Bruni’s opinion, a large pile of nothing because Amy is campaigning on “no, we can’t”:

“She’s campaigning — admirably — in the realm of the doable.”

And Medicare for All, which most Americans back and which distinct majorities of Democrats and independents back, is not doable, at least in Frank Bruni’s world. I’d go wondering why, but “centrists” (congressional centrists rather than human centrists) typically have two options for why they oppose something most people support:

1. They wish to keep being read by the rich white conservatives who read the publications that employ centrists.
2. Something even less compassionate, such as “my quarterly dividends from my health insurance stocks would decrease” or “unlucky strangers suffering and dying for no good reason isn’t an argument in favor of changing anything.”

Anyway, back to Amy. This latest email from her is ridiculously on-brand. It also typifies her struggle: She is a centrist (again, the congressional center, not the human one) competing in a field crowded with centrists, and those centrists are bigger deals than she is.

Remember in high school you had that one class with three girls who had the same first name, so to distinguish between them, the teacher said Amy F., Amy R. or Amy K.?

Amy F. was really smart. At four years old, she’d constructed her first solar panel out of decades-old aluminum cans she’d found in a disused field, copper wiring from a broken Speak & Spell and moldy banana peel. At seven, she’d won a poetry contest meant for girls ages 10–14, then voluntarily never entered again (because why bother?). At 12, she’d backpacked solo across Thailand and discovered a dinosaur species that taxonomists were busily naming for her favorite 18th century African fungal microbiologist (at her demure request, of course). And if all that wasn’t annoying brilliant enough, she was so nice that nobody could even be mad at her for killing the curve in classes she wasn’t taking.

Amy R. was impossibly pretty, and she also hosted the (invite-only) party of the year — the one where, the Monday after, seven students looked like they’d seen a ghost and it had performed life-changing oral sex on them. So mysteriously amazing was this event that every year, an ordinary word — gelatinous, Bermuda, crowning — became an inside joke, and to understand it, you had to listen to four oral histories of the party.

Amy K. was … Amy K. She wasn’t ugly, but she also wasn’t anything to look at, and her grades and interests were so meh that even her guidance counselor had no idea what direction to steer her in because … what was she any good at?

Amy K. soon tired of being “other Amy.” One day, Amy F.’s girlfriend, Sabrina, walked into the Amys’ class and said “Amy, honey?” And Amy K. — desperate for attention — turned around and said “Yes?”, knowing full well that Sabrina was talking to Amy F., not Amy K. For a week after, Amy K. was all “remember that time Sabrina specifically requested my attention in class?” … only Sabrina wasn’t requesting Amy K.’s attention, and everyone knew it, and the lie (and liar) got so annoying that Amy F.’s girlfriend started calling her Fally, short for her last name (Fallingham), and Amy R. decided that she should be called by her last name (Richards) from then on, and suddenly Amy K. couldn’t even pretend that someone who mattered had mentioned her.

One day, in a desperate bid for attention, she responded to the word “any” — offering, weakly, that she’d “misheard” and thought someone had said Amy.

Everyone promptly stopped saying “any.”

That’s Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign. She’s a midwestern centrist, and not the one getting the attention.

She’s not the kooky brown-haired woman running.

She’s neither of the black people running.

She’s not the “folksy” lesser half of the Obama-Biden pairing who can’t remember where he is, who he served under or how to speak in complete sentences.

She’s not the guy who looks like he just gave a balloon a noogie with his head.

And she’s not the guy who has a gang.

She’s … Amy K. So if someone mentions her — even in passing, even to say she’s as hopeless as Louis CK in a contest in which the last man to masturbate in front of a woman wins — she’s going to take it as a sign.

It’s all she has going for her.